An increasing amount of sensitive data (e.g., personal information, financial data, medical information, etc.) is being stored on computing systems. At the same time, the attempts by hackers and other malicious individuals to compromise or steal such sensitive data have become increasingly sophisticated and frequent. In one method to combat such attempts, data may be stored in an encrypted manner, such that even if a hacker were to gain access to a computing system, the data will appear in a form that is incomprehensible to the hacker.
Data encryption, however, poses certain challenges during the startup of an operating system. Such challenges as well as solutions to address these challenges are described hereinbelow.